


Splinter

by Anythingtoasted



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Endverse, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-08
Updated: 2013-03-08
Packaged: 2017-12-04 15:04:51
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,550
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/712078
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Anythingtoasted/pseuds/Anythingtoasted
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Castiel breaks his foot. (endverse)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Splinter

It was a run that went awry some fifty miles from the camp; Dean led, as was usual; pointed them forward with a hand that did not tremble; with his rifle slung over one shoulder and Castiel at the other, chewing at a hangnail, gun sitting lonely in the holster on his leg. The angel, walking beside him, sighed and spat the chewed remains of his nail into the dirt, then blurred it with the toe of his boot. He looked at Dean as they walked.

“You sure we’re even here for a  _reason?”_ He said, incredulous, and Dean glanced at him – replied in a low voice, so the group behind them wouldn’t hear.

“That guy we took in last week said last time they saw the Colt, it was here.”

Castiel raised an eyebrow but didn’t argue; he started in on the next nail, slathering his fingers with spit. Dean made a face, disgusted.

“Do you  _have_ to do that?”

The ex-angel looked at him mildly. He shrugged, and continued.

They pressed on through the ruins; eventually every town started to look the same, even to Castiel, whose sense of direction and time was above that of a normal human’s, fallen or not.

When all the buildings were half-smashed and leaking rubble, and the roads were all strewn with corpses, it wasn’t hard to mistake one city for another.

Footsteps thudded ahead of them. Dean, convulsively, grabbed hold of his gun and pointed it in the direction of the noise. He barked for Risa to help him investigate – he never asked Castiel, he noted smugly; for what reason, Dean would never directly divulge , and Cas had asked him enough times.

He grinned to himself and wandered away,  ignoring the group behind him. They were mostly new recruits; quivering, desperate ex-civilians who wouldn’t last a week; Castiel didn’t see the point in getting to know them. He crouched in the dust; where the pavement had cracked a weed rose through the tarmac – a straggler, weak and yellowed, growing crookedly in the direction of the sun. Castiel wrapped its thin stem around one finger and yanked it from the earth – yellow stem, roots and all, like pulling the plug out of a full bathtub – and just as satisfying. He contemplated pocketing the weed, but dropped it on the tarmac, instead.

The thudding was  _loud._

Castiel turned in time to be blindsided – a Croat, a young woman, maybe thirty years old, caught him with her shoulder and sent him sprawling onto the floor. She made as if to run past him – then turned back and threw herself upon him, snarling and gritting her teeth, making jerky, jagged movements for his throat with her mostly broken teeth. Castiel pushed at her, disgusted – took hold of her by the shoulders to keep her still, then headbutted her, hard, in the nose. The _crack_ was almost as good as pulling the weed from the ground; almost. He scrambled out from underneath her, and started to run.

Dean was nowhere to be seen. Where there had once been a deserted main street there was now a moaning, writhing mass of bodies – of Croats and Chiquitans alike, the screaming coming from both sides. As he cleared the street, making for the corner where Dean and Risa had gone, bodies smashed into him – Croats,  frenzied with the scent of blood, which had started to permeate the air; camp residents, their faces ashen, bloodless, their mouths and eyes gaping wide. Castiel pushed past them – he rounded the corner and found himself in an alleyway that led to yet another street, and at the end of it were – he silently, involuntarily thanked God – Dean and Risa, the former gesturing wide with his hands, shouting, “ _Cas!_ Cas, fucking _run!”_

Castiel didn’t need telling twice. He sprinted down the alleyway, leaving behind him the seething horde; a Croat, close behind, surprised him by grabbing his shoulder but he shook it off, twitching its hands from his shirt, and kept running.

He reached Dean and Risa and the two of them nodded at him – barely – and then started running again. Dean, beside him, shouted above the fray – the squawk of horrified humans, the wails and groans of Croats feeding, their teeth scraping bluntly in the maws of thick, hollowed-out flesh that were the stomachs of the Chiquitans left behind  - “Anyone with you?” he said, though he must have known Castiel was alone, protected by the Croat’s distaste for his lingering Grace.  

“No.” he said, back, and tried, and failed, to feel remorse. He hadn’t known them; they were nothing to him. Dean, however, tightened his jaw and cursed. But he kept running.

Risa leading – barking directions at them – they reached the borderline of the city. On either side of them were houses, their doors gaping wide. The street was deserted, but for bodies of children and women and men, half-decomposed. Beneath Castiel’s foot crunched the ribcage of a dog, rotted – he accidentally dragged his toe against the collar, its red leather still looped around the half-furred flesh, the emerging white of its strange, bent spine – and winced. Stumbling (but only a little), he ran on.

Ahead of them were low concrete barricades; a first-ditch effort by the military to stop people evacuating of their own volition, and widely a failure. Risa hopped one with ease, Dean doing the same, and Castiel thought vaguely  _I’m too ancient for this bullshit_ as he tried to follow suit – and caught his foot, as he had with the collar, except this time when he landed his ankle twisted strangely and he cried out, chin hitting the dirt so suddenly he could barely believe it. Dean, hearing him, turned back.

“Cas, c’mon, they’ll be here any second!” he shouted. Castiel nodded from the floor, and pushed himself up with his arms – then yowled again in pain and fell to the ground. He tried again – planted his palms flat on the ground and managed to push himself up to a sitting position with his left foot and his hands, alone. Then, pulling his right foot out in front of him, he looked at it. And stared.

Like the spine of the dog, the bone was showing through; his foot was bent jaunty, his boot black but his bone white and his blood red, cartilage and muscle showing through. He stared endlessly. Dean, ahead, ran back to him. “Cas, get off your ass, I’m-“ he stopped. “Holy  _shit,_ what did you  _do?”_

Castiel blinked. More than the pain, there was the  _surprise_. He shook his head.

“I don’t know.” He breathed. He tried to move his foot, and groaned. “I can’t stand up.” He breathed, horror gripping the base of his throat. Dean saw him panicking.

“Cas, it’s okay.” He said quickly, flippant. He shouted Risa over, and the two of them supported him over to the chain link fence and out underneath it. It was the longest walk Castiel had ever taken in his life – pain and horror blurred his vision until he could see nothing but the vague shapes of the car as it came into view, hear nothing but fuzz when Dean murmured admonishments at his ear as they heaved him into the car. Dean left him – to drive – when they got him strapped in, but Risa sat beside him and offered her own spiky condolences, a hand hesitant on his shoulder the whole ride.

Castiel looked at her at one point and his vision lifted – centred with diamond bright clarity on her face – and then his eyes rolled back into his head, and he saw nothing else.

* * *

He woke in the cabin everyone referred to as Dean’s, but which Castiel spent most of his waking (and sleeping) hours in, too. He was in bed, on top of the sheets – stretched out in front of him was his leg, the end of it a mass of white bandages. He _hurt._

There was no one in the room with him – it spread out in front of him, impersonal and huge; there was nothing of him here, nothing even of Dean, and for a strange, dizzy moment he felt suddenly utterly and completely alone.  _Lonely,_ even, the sensation as alien as it was pathetic.

He cursed himself for his sigh of relief when Dean entered, ducking through the doorway, his eyes alighting immediately on Castiel.

“You’re up.” He said, simply. Castiel nodded. Dean walked over, and sat beside him, on the edge of the bed. He touched Castiel’sknee.

This, too, was unfamiliar; Dean’s touch was so seldom light, during the day, and now he was brushing his thumb in circles against Castiel’s leg, stirring the hair, pushing it back and forth, the motion soothing, tender.

They usually kissed when the lights were off; when Dean was tired and there was no one else around to hold him, no one else to kiss the bridge of his nose and tell him it would be alright.  Castiel had never seen him naked in the light; only in shadow, casting his shirt aside to climb astride Castiel and grip his flesh, tight, and rumble his breaths in his ear.

Dean was looking at him, earnest. His other hand rested on the bed, beside Castiel’s shoulder. His thumb continued its circling, blurring Castiel’s mind again, his entire body focused on that single point of contact. Dean mumbled, “I was fucking worried about you.” looking him in the eyes.

And then he leaned forward, and it was strange – he lifted his hand from Castiel’s knee and used it to tip the ex-angel’s face up, to kiss his mouth, his eyes closed. Castiel pushed forward to let him know it was accepted; his brain pushed at him, buzzed,  _yes,_ buzzed,  _kiss me in the daylight, kiss me outside._ His thoughts were jumbled and foreign and incongruous, sad and flat and odd. He blinked when Dean pulled away.

“What’s wrong with me?” his voice came out slurred. Dean grinned at him.

“Painkillers. You’ll be okay.”

“I feel-“ he realised his mouth was slack, and closed it properly. He grabbed Dean’s shoulder, and pulled him forward again – kissed him with an open mouth, nose smudging against his cheek, innacurate and sloppy and  _wonderful,_ through a haze of bleary white. “-incredible.” He muttered – because the scars on his back didn’t itch, the broken foot didn’t ache. His mind was clear, thoughts floating in and then passing on again, like one long, extended version of how it felt to faint; the twilight before the darkness; a warm, all-consuming embrace.

“Yeah, well.” Dean smiled strangely at him, pulling away. “That’ll be the morphine.”

Castiel nodded distantly. He tugged Dean forward again with insistent hands – dragged his lips against Dean’s, relishing how each movement stirred his chest, his lungs, his heart; set his skin on fire like kisses never had before, the cusp of a feeling that was never quite enough, and he chased it, making noise in the base of his throat, like hunger. Dean chuckled at him.

“We should get you on this stuff more often,” he muttered, “You’re a lot more friendly.”

“Can we – “ Castiel gestured between them, hand not really his own, “- like this?”

Dean lifted an eyebrow. “Maybe not right now, champ.” Patronising. Castiel felt a flare of annoyance, but as quickly as it had arrived, it drifted away. He smiled, big, and wide.

“But later?” he said. Dean huffed a laugh.

“Yeah.” He said, clearly lying. “Sure thing.”

Castiel let his head list back, tired, against the pillow. He drew up his good leg, and held it with one of his arms, around the knee. He grinned, wide. Dean smirked at him.

“I’ve never seen you smile like that.” He said mildly. Castiel grinned wider.

“Me neither.”

Dean barked, laughing. “Sleep it off, Cas. You sound like a junkie.”

Castiel nodded, already half asleep. He blinked, slow, and the room started to spiral away. “Dean.” He murmured, as Dean stroked further circles onto his knee.

He heard, through the haze, “Yeah, Cas?”

“Did you miss me?” he slurred. Dean laughed.

“Yeah, Cas.” The thumb on his knee paused, briefly, in its movements. “Yeah, I missed you.”

“Good.” He drawled. “I want you to.”

Dean didn’t visit again.

The others came to see him, in dribbles; offered their condolences, played cards with him, offered him cigarettes, which he declined. They brought him books and told him what was going on in the camp, and explained away his questions about Dean – he was busy, he was on a run, he was in his cabin but not to be disturbed.

Castiel wondered which cabin was Dean’s, if it was not this one.

 He ached for his leg to heal; and eventually the scars started to ache again, too; the scratchy, constant reminders of his Fall. They pulled at him in his sleep, trailed spider-web hands over his flesh, whispered their susurrus of wanting against his ribs and chest.

He dreamt of angelhood.

Of flying.

He took pills – paracetamol and aspirin, chasing the glorious, honeydew haze he’d first woken to; to Dean’s stirring touch on his leg, the soft breeze, the perfect warmth that melted on his bones like a liquid sheen of steel, coating every stem of him.

It never returned.

But he healed, eventually, and found it in other things; found that his wings itched less like phantom limbs when he was stoned, that his drunkenness helped him not to care.

That he slept better after a fifth of whiskey – and when that didn’t work, another did the trick. He hobbled for weeks, weak and  _angry_ and distant from the whole world, cloistered in the cabin that was neither officially his nor apparently Dean’s.

And their fearless leader did not visit – not again. Out of fear or a lack of care or both, or neither, Castiel didn’t know. But he amused himself in other ways, and when he was healed – when a group of them cracked the cast off and cheered, grinning – he sought Dean out himself, leg still trembling when he walked. He found him, easily enough.

Dean raised his head from the maps spread out on the table in the storage room, and looked at Castiel as if he didn’t even recognise him.

“Cas.” He said, voice distant as Cas felt from the moment. The gap between them, yawning,  _ached._

“Hi.” He said coldly, in reply. “You’ve been busy, huh?”

Dean nodded. Castiel nodded in reply.

“Okay.” He said, throwaway. Dean opened his mouth – then closed it. Castiel turned away.

He made for the door and heard behind him, “Cas,” soft. “Cas, I missed you.”

But the words don’t mean anything to him, anymore; and when Dean comes to him that night in the darkness after a run; when he strips off his pants and shirt in a shaft of moonlight, his skin seeming white and cool as ivory, running hot to the touch, Castiel lets him in, like he always will.

But there’s something else in his bones now, and it’s not Dean.

He wakes in the morning and leaves the ownerless cabin, stumbles down the steps and into the sunlight, takes a fresh breath of air and feels it –  _feels it –_  among everything else – and wishes, more than anything, that he couldn’t anymore.  


End file.
